Free Republic

Scientists at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have designed and tested an all-solid lithium-sulfur battery with approximately four times the energy density of conventional lithium-ion technologies that power today's electronics. The ORNL battery design, which uses abundant low-cost elemental sulfur, also addresses flammability concerns experienced by other chemistries. "Our approach is a complete change from the current battery concept of two electrodes joined by a liquid electrolyte, which has been used over the last 150 to 200 years," said Chengdu Liang, lead author on the ORNL study published this week in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. Scientists have...

An alleged Islamic militant has told a Belgian court how he plotted to bomb a military base on an al-Qaeda mission. Nizar Trabelsi, a former Tunisian professional footballer, told how Osama Bin Laden's network sent him two years ago to Belgium to bomb the Kleine Brogel base, which houses nuclear missiles. He is one of 23 alleged Islamic militants on trial. Only eight of them are in custody, while five are still on the run and the others face lesser charges. "I was supposed to go alone in a van. The bomb was behind me," Mr Trabelsi told the Brussels...

One way to curb global warming is to purposely shoot sulfur into the atmosphere, a scientists suggested today. The burning of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. It also releases sulfur that cools the planet by reflecting solar radiation away from Earth. Injecting sulfur into the second atmospheric layer closest to Earth would reflect more sunlight back to space and offset greenhouse gas warming, according to Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California at San Diego. Crutzen suggests carrying sulfur...